The Inseparables

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Comment about Israel, partitioning, and the Palestinian problem. A week ago, after two car bombings that took eight lives, the Israeli Army closed the main road in the Gaza Strip. Traffic was rerouted through the town of Dir el-Balah. Drivers read fresh graffiti on the walls: "We will knock on the doors of Paradise with the skulls of Jews." Over the past six months, more than sixty Israelis have been killed in outrages for which Hamas and Islamic Jihad have claimed responsibility. Yasir Arafat, it seems, can no more control Islamic terrorists than the Lebanese could control Arafat's own terrorists during the '70s. Every Israeli faction has seen its prescription for peace shattered. Likud hawks thought they could annex the occupied territories and intimidate the Palestinians; they got the intifada. Labor doves thought they could build confidence in peace during a vague five-year transition; they are getting car bombs. No wonder, then, that there is increasing interest in what Thomas L. Friedman, writing in the Times not long before the latest round of blood revenge, called "new thinking"--specifically, the idea of "separation," which is to say the physical fencing off of Israelis from Palestinians. P.M. Yitzhak Rabin's own ministers and supporters have themselves been saying this sort of thing lately, and Rabin has been getting the message. His government has all but closed the Israeli economy to Palestinian workers; as many as 70,000 "guest workers" from Thailand, the Philippines, and other countries have been imported to replace them. And there is talk of spending a half-billion on a high-tech security fence on the West Bank, like the one on Israel's border with Lebanon. But what else can be done? One way to address the problem is almost never seriously considered: to have Israelis and Palestinians establish a joint security force, perhaps with U.N. assistance. The worst thing about talk of separation is how it slights Israel's great achievement of the last decade: the participation of its new generation of managers and scientists in global markets. Israel's gross domestic product, which ten years ago was less than $25 billion, is now approaching $70 billion. With the help of European and American investment, Israel is thriving in an increasingly borderless world economy. There is no longer any serious threat to Israel's existence or even to its military superiority. The point is that Jews and Arabs do have a demographic problem, and a more complex one than anything in Canada or Belgium or Sri Lanka. If there is still hope it is that the leaders of Israel, Palestine, and Jordan will start building toward a complex interlocking future, and not toward a simplified two-state program, which carbombs easily discredit, barbed wire or no.

Bernard Avishai’s latest book is “Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness.” He is a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College and an adjunct professor of business at the Hebrew University.